Series 2 Episode 2 - Sleeper: Opens on a couple sleeping in bed. The woman is woken by a noise in the house and her partner picks up a bat and goes to investigate. Two men in balaclavas burst into the room. The camera pans under the bed and we hear the pleading of the two men. The man is unconscious, so what is the woman doing to them?

Captain Jack and Tosh visit the scene, but the cricket bat the man was carrying doesn’t match with the long stab wounds that the burglars suffered.

In the hospital, Gwen and Owen are pondering whether the man or the woman was the burglar. Owen tricks Gwen into staying the night with the burglar who’s alive. He wakes up in terror and dies soon after.

That’s enough for Jack and Gwen to whip the woman into custody for questioning. They question her, but she has no memory of the incident. She becomes stressed under questioning and blows the lightbulbs in the room. Later, Owen tries to take a blood sample but the needles keep breaking on her skin. Even a scalpel blade snaps whenever he tries to use it.

Jack comes to the conclusion that the woman (Beth) is an alien, but she seems to geniunely have no knowledge - she even claims that aliens don’t exist. They use a probe to try and determine what kind of alien she is. Jack says that “the probe drills down into your subconscious so if there’s anything hidden it’ll find it.”

They subject Beth to an intense probing which reveals nothing. However, she passes out afterward and the skin on her arm transforms to reveal an alien body. Naoko discovers a secret compartment within Beth which she would have no knowledge of. At the same time, Beth starts speaking in an alien language and Jack deduces that she’s some kind of sleeper agent.

They pass this information on to Beth, who is understandably freaked out about the whole thing. Jack offers her no hope - telling her that she’ll eventually activate and become a killer. The team decide that the best recourse is to cryogenically freeze her until they can establish how to cure her.

Unfortunately, somewhere across town, other sleeper agents are being activated in response to Beth’s impending deep freeze (particularly loved the chav one by the way!). Isn’t it interesting that Beth - a sleeper agent - gets stored in cryo-chamber 007?

Anyway, Beth somehow bucks the security system at Torchwood and escapes to the hospital where she talks to her boyfriend and tells him she’s leaving. She becomes upset as they embrace and her alien half mutates and stabs him. Eww.

As Jack and Gwen catch up with Beth the other sleeper agents go on a killing spree. Beth discovers how to use her abilities to track down the other agents and they set off in pursuit. The final sleeper is heading for a military base where there are 10 nuclear warheads hidden underground.

Jack and Gwen catch up with the sleeper at a military base where they try to apprehend him. He stabs Jack through the heart and tells him that they know all about him and Torchwood and they’ve “factored them into their plans”. As Gwen deactivates the alien’s force-field, he reveals that the other aliens are already here (on Earth). He then blows himself up.

Back at Torchwood, Beth pleads with Gwen to shoot her if she becomes completely alien. However, she activates the blade in her arm and holds it to Gwen’s throat. The team aim their respective guns on Beth, but Gwen realises that she has no hope left and wants to die. They fire on her and kill her.

That leaves the issue of other aliens or sleepers. Are they spread out worldwide or just concentrated on the Cardiff region? What’s their motivation?